My life on the borderlands.

Tag Archives: help

Get a job. If you can’t find one, make one up and go for it. If you can’t do this, volunteer. Volunteering often leads to paid jobs.

Workyour butt off. That is, throw yourself completely and enthusiastically into whatever you are doing.

Rest frequently. Even a 5 minute eyes-closed phone-turned-off door-locked DO NOT DISTURB rest can refresh and heal you like nobody’s business.

Cultivate your friendships. Gardens and friendships both require feeding, watering, weeding, and (occasionally) hard pruning in order to stay healthy.

Don’t blame others for your mistakes. On the other hand, don’t blame yourself for your mistakes, either. Simply accept that you are human, and have made a mistake, and resolve to learn from it so your pain is not repeated.

Notice, and release, “us-them” thinking wherever possible.

Don’t despair. It’s the nature of reality to change frequently, and there are no last chances for happiness even on your deathbed.

Cultivate gratitude. However resentfully and reluctantly, make a conscious daily effort to notice at least one blessing in your life.

Make a sincere effort, then release the need to control the results.

Ask for what you really want, not what you think you can get.

Budget.

Make the most of the opportunities you have instead of wasting energy wishing you had better ones.

Keep looking for better ones.

Don’t lie, even when they do.

Don’t sign anything you don’t understand. Don’t be ashamed to ask for explanations.

Try to do as good a job in the small things as you do in the large.

Don’t criticize others behind their backs. If you can’t find something good to say, hum.

If in doubt about what decision to make, consider putting off the decision for 3 minutes, 3 hours, 3 days, 3 weeks, 3 months, or 3 years. By that time either the situation will have resolved itself, another opportunity will have arisen, or you will have been shown what to do.

Keep your numbers. That is, keep track of how much money you earn and how much money you spend from day to day, so that at the end of the month you have a better idea of your spending patterns, and how to revise your budget in light of those patterns.

Encourage the young, but don’t preach to them.

When you make a mistake, ask, “What can I do differently next time?” The only failures are those who refuse to learn from failure.

Exercise, however feebly. It soothes depression and sharpens the mind.

Drink lots of water.

Trust yourself.

Don’t say “Yes” when you want to say “No”, and vice versa.

Ask for help. Keep on asking as many sources as you can until you get that help you need.

Don’t waste time worrying about your enemies. Divine Love and Truth will handle them if you let It, either by turning them into your friends or making their influence on your life irrelevant.

When a child is born into physical reality, from a psychological perspective it has no hope or despair, for it is aware only of the present moment and the universe of itself. When a child “hopes for” something, it is not hope that one speaks of, but desire: craving, wish, longing, which all humans possess from inception. If it were not so–if the human infant did not feel and communicate its cravings–it might well die before its caregivers, or those around it, noticed it needed anything. The same is true of dogs and cats and other domestic animals. At birth they live in the present, and their internal lives are characterized by desire: for the warmth of the body of the caregiver; for the milk the caregiver provides, or other sustenance; and for the chance to exercise, play, and learn from their environment and peers.

Hope and despair become conscious emotions or experiences when the child reaches the age when its brain is sufficiently developed for it to be aware of the passage of time, and when it is able to distinguish between self and others. This may take place [by] the age of 8 in many cases. This is why little children were able to play even in concentration camps. Fatigue, exhaustion, and terror were all available to them, but not despair as such, although they could become afraid and depressed at the despair of the adults around them.

We mention these things because to understand hope one must understand that hope, like despair, arise when one achieves the maturity to sense boundaries to gratification and also the possibility of a positive or negative outcome in time. God, for instance, does not hope, because God is outside of time, and is complete in Itself, of Whom It considers you a particle. God knows that Love is Its nature in all parts of Itself, including you; and that on the divine level, Love is never defeated or denied. Therefore It need have no anxiety about the future or regret about the past. Amor vincit omnia: love conquers all resistance eventually. Eventually, everyone who has turned its back upon Love will be wooed back into Its arms (we speak figuratively of course).

What, then, is hope, and how does one attain and maintain an attitude of hope when one is beleaguered by unpleasant or discouraging circumstances?

On the Wheel of Creation, Mr Rand and Mr Alex’s template for manifestation in physical reality, hope is allied with belief. To increase belief (in positive outcome, in the eventual victory of Love over all resistance to It) one must look across the center of the Wheel, across the hub called Harmony of Desire, to the spoke opposite that of belief: the support spoke. Put simply, if you lack hope, it is because you lack a sense of support for your longed for condition or goal. To increase hope, therefore, it is necessary to increase one’s sense of support.

How does one do this, particularly when one is discouraged or depressed? . . . By seeking out those who share similar beliefs to your own: similar values, similar cultural backgrounds, similar mindsets, similar thought processes, similar interests and experiences. As support grows, so does belief that positive outcome is possible.

A basic principle in physical reality is that it is extremely difficult to find hope without interaction with other sentient beings. In short, it is very very difficult to climb out of despair alone, or in isolation (though not impossible if one has already developed a rich sense of Divine Love and a habit for dialoguing with It). Twelve Step recovery programs work in part because they offer addicted individuals the hope that, if they work the introspective and self-revelatory meditative exercises expressed in the Twelve Steps, and find a sponsor and attend regular meetings with others like themselves, they will find relief from addiction. For it is a fact that despair can become an addiction: a habituated pattern of emotional response to life that is driven not necessarily by present difficulties, dramatic though they may be, but by the brain having become so drenched in force, threat, and blame in the past that it cannot right the chemical imbalances created by such drenching.

To lift one’s brain out of despair-drenching, one must begin by accepting that one is trapped in despair with a desire to learn from the experience. Then one must begin asking questions: How did I get into my present situation? What actions or inactions did I perform, and what strategies did I use, to create or fall prey to my present difficulties? By coming to grips with the physical and psychological processes that led to the choices that have led to one’s force-threat-blame experiences, one then must begin inquiring into whether there are deeper forces at work—spiritual, intellectual, or evaluative patterns that are feeding into one’s despair. If one asks and keeps on asking for enlightenment on this issue, one will certainly be rewarded with an answer or answers. And the answer or answers discovered will contain within them clues as to how one may escape from, or work with, the present difficulty that has led one to give up hope.

When light begins to dawn, and one begins to see the reasons physical and spiritual behind one’s difficulties, one must then commit oneself to finding the path of Love through one’s difficulties. How can I learn to love myself given the choices I have made? How can I learn to love my enemies to the extent to which they will allow and without violating myself in the process? Taking these questions to one’s Greater Self, and to one’s support systems (friends, family, doctors, counselors, teachers and so forth), one will eventually come up with a plan of action the sole purpose of which is to find the most direct route to giving myself the solace, information, help and resources [I need] to change [my] difficult circumstance into one that is more life-affirming. For some persons (and some circumstances), science yields clues to the most direct route to harmony. For others, philosophy or religion; and for still others, the taking of practical physical action to find support for the next step in one’s strategy for self-rescue; or a combination of the utilizations of all these tools.

I began this thread by reviewing the least creative levels of consciousness, those levels that limit most the creative expression of consciousness in physical reality. These consciousness levels I call:

To Control and To Be Controlled Absolutely

To Force and To Be Forced

To Threaten and To Be Threatened

To Blame and To Be Blamed Undeservedly

To raise myself from these levels of consciousness, all I need do is say, “Yes,” to the reality of my suffering and be willing to learn from my experience. This immediately brings me to the more creative level of consciousness that I call:

To Accept With Intent to Learn

Next I needed to understand how my situation came about, including any forces involved in its creation and maintenance. To accomplish this understanding, I found I needed to ask questions: first, questions designed to uncover the physical and psychological processes involved in my suffering; and second, if I required further understanding, questions designed to uncover the broader spiritual, theoretical, or historical processes involved in my suffering. Asking these questions raised me to the next most creative levels of consciousness, levels that I call:

To Understand Physically

To Understand Spiritually

Now I find myself at the next most creative level of consciousness, the level of consciousness I call:

To Give

To Give is a dynamic level of consciousness, one that involves willingness to take any and all nonabusive steps necessaryTo Give myself the physical, emotional, intellectual, or spiritual resources required for healing the situation that is causing my suffering. Finding such resources almost always involves asking others for help. This can be very hard to do, particularly if I am ashamed of the part I may have played in bringing my situation about or permitting it to come about. Such shame arises from the consciousness level of To Blame. And we have seen already that in order to raise myself from my the consciousness level of To Blame I must accept that I feel this way and be willing to learn from it. This raises me from the consciousness level of To Blame to the level I call To Accept With Intent to Learn, which in turn opens my mind To Understand Physically and Spiritually the dynamics of my shame and readies me To Give myself the help I need to heal my situation.

The wonderful thing is that, once I get into the habit of taking the action to give myself the help I need to relieve my suffering, that attitude of To Give overflows to others. I find an inner strength welling up in me, a feeling of sureness, dignity, and rightness that others see and wish to emulate. Giving from an overflow of enjoyed resources is a very different experience from the kind of codependent giving that many of us mistake for noble spirituality. It raises one immediately to the level of consciousness that I call To Love.

Don’t misunderstand me here: sacrifice has its place in spiritual evolution. But sacrifice as it is commonly practiced by religious ascetics and martyrs often arises from the consciousness level of To Force, and does not, in the end, succeed in healing the endless power struggle that characterizes so much of civilization. (To understand the proper place of sacrifice in the greater scheme of things, see my future blog, To Know That One Already Has.)

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About Rand B. Lee, The Rational Psychic

Since the mid-1980s Rand B. Lee has served an international clientele as a professional psychic specializing in life-purpose, career, love, wellness, relationships, spiritual development, prosperity, recovery, the Tarot and trancework. Rand works with individuals, couples, and groups in person, over the telephone, or via Skype.